Americana

Twenty years after the Second American Civil War, East and West remain divided. Natural disasters and extreme weather have ravaged both sides and many of the outlying communities maintain a tenuous independence, their alliances shifting as resources grow increasingly scare. In the eastern Republic, conservative values rule a capitalist class system whose economy has become built on prolonging the cold war. California and the other progressive western states declared their independence, establishing a fledgling federation that is still struggling to find its place on the world stage.

When an escaped soldier crash-lands behind Federation lines, she reveals that she is carrying a message for the Governor from the son that she was forced to leave behind. His younger sister, Virginia was only an infant when her family fled the war, but her brother was taken from them and the effect on her parents has cast a shadow over her entire life. The message is her chance to make things right, to finally see something of the wider world, and to save her brother from the traitor's sentence that he has been serving in her parents' stead. She sets off on an adventure across the fractured country - from the rural Northwest to the crowded co-ops of California, past the last bastion of Las Vegas and through the new Wild West of the Disputed Lands, sheltering with the rebuilt cities of the Gulf Coast, and navigating up the Mississippi river to the new capitol that was built after the flooding of Washington D.C. Along the way, she amasses a merry band of misfits - the soldier escaping gender persecution, an old pothead with ties to the revolution, and a devil-may-care cowboy looking for revenge. Meanwhile, her brother, Mason, works to bridge the divide from within the Republic, or at least to prevent his employer from unleashing a weapon that will "end the war for good."